ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on relatively simple forms of social perception and action, in order to emphasize the evolutionary continuity of social affordances and shared awareness. The insights achieved by the new school of ecological psychology, which has developed out of the work of the late James Gibson. The chapter sketches out precisely how far this ecological point of view succeeds in such a task. It analyses not only what the affordances of things are, but what kind of information specifies these affordances to observers, and by means of what processes observers might learn to detect the information and thereby come to realize the affordance. It gives a partial elaboration of this profound insight that the distinction between the animate and the inanimate lies largely in the autonomous actions of animals. The widespread presence of socialized action and awareness among mammals and birds indicates the inadequacy of the time-worn concepts of modern social science, concepts that divide subject from object.
